


Rise Up (Like the Sun)

by Chill_with_Penguins



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Norse Religion & Lore, Thor: The Dark World - Fandom
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, F/M, I Don't Even Know, I mixed norse mythology and the MCU, Odin is a massive dick, Off-screen Character Death, no seriously, whoops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-08-02 15:42:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16307996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chill_with_Penguins/pseuds/Chill_with_Penguins
Summary: When Hela steps through the portal and out of inky blackness, she smooths back her hair with something lostpainedcrazed in her eyes. It's a look Loki recognizes well--he's seen it in a mirror one too many times. He saw it before New York.He takes a half-step backwards, fear tinging the edge of his common sense, and asks Heimdall to take them back (to take them away from this monster).(At least, this is what is supposed to happen. Whether or not it does--well. Time is a tricky thing. Loki is a tricky god. He's fairly confident it'll all work out, in the end.)~OR~My best friend made me think about Loki FeelsTM and this is what resulted. So. Yeah. Blame her, not me.





	Rise Up (Like the Sun)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Blackbutlersecrets](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blackbutlersecrets/gifts).



> General trigger warnings for Loki being Loki and therefore full of angsty pain and whatnot. Much family drama, because Asgardians, what even are you.

When Loki was a boy, the throne room was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen, all sloping golden ceilings and delicate art scattered across every surface.

Now, so many years later, power thrumming all around him, the faint taste of bitter almonds on his tongue (Silvertongue, they called him; Loki of Lies and Mischief and Chaos, his future spilled out ahead of him in so many Vikings' blood before he could even walk), it just feels... cold. 

Loki feels a hysterical laugh bubbling up, doesn't let it out. The cold be an old friend by now, shouldn't it? His traitorous Jotun blood, pounding through his veins, keeping his skin from frosting over. 

He wants... something. He's not even sure what, really--to cry? To scream? To laugh, laugh until the end comes, until they hold him down and sew his mouth shut, until everything tastes like blood and iron?

There is too much in him, to many things he can't even begin to identify, standing in this room after everything that's happened. Standing in this room after the fall. The weight of it gets caught in the back of his throat and he opens his mouth to scream. 

All that comes out is a dry laugh. "Hello, Mother. Have I made you proud?"

*

~~Eons~~ ~~seconds~~ Years later, when Hela steps through the portal and out of inky blackness, she smooths back her hair with something lostpainedcrazed in her eyes. It's a look Loki recognizes well--he's seen it in a mirror one too many times. He saw it before New York. 

He takes a half-step backwards, fear tinging the edge of his common sense, and asks Heimdall to take them back (to take them away from this monster). 

(At least, this is what is supposed to happen. Whether or not it does--well. Time is a tricky thing. Loki is a tricky god. He's fairly confident it'll all work out, in the end.)

*

"Your birthright was to die!" Odin shouts, fury etched into every line on his aging face. "As a child, cast out onto a frozen rock."

But, but, but, was it? Was it really? Loki knows the back doors through realms, he's fallen through the cosmos and survived, he's watched things greater than Gods rise and fall. By the norns, even spending an evening in the library would have been enough to learn of Jotun tradition when it comes to the royal family. 

Loki hasn't spent an evening, he's spent many, almost all of them in the millennia he's been alive--

(Did you really think Loki Realm-Walker would have let the first time he went to Jotunheim be to babysit his blood-lusting brother?)

\--Which means there are two options, here. Either Odin didn't bother to learn even basic facts about Jotunheim, such as the importance of leaving the heir in that particular temple, so close to the heart of Jotunheim itself, or he's lying. 

(Most everything Loki got from Frigga--his Silvertongue, his magic, his style of fighting, using daggers and tricks to kill while the other person is still laughing about how easy it will all be. Hel, even the little bits of kindness that Thanos killed off had been hers. But lies--well. They are not her domain. Odin, however. Odin sits on gold that isn't his surrounded by history that isn't true. Take your guess which one the lies came from.)

*

(When Loki was in New York, Stark came to him. He waited for the tears, for the pleading, for the desperate bargains of a man with a dying world.

They didn't come. 

Instead, he said, "You're missing the point." He said, "We have a Hulk." He said, "Maybe your army comes and maybe it's too much for us, but it's all on you."

He said, "If we can't protect the Earth you can be damn well sure we'll avenge it."

And Loki smiled. And Loki laughed, tried to ignore the phantom of himself buried in this mortal god, tried to ignore the way both their eyes shone too brightly. 

And Loki lost.)

*

"It's not that I don't love our little talks," he says, a bitter little smile toying with his lips, "It's just... I don't love them."

He waits for the death penalty, waits for the end of all this pain to come, waits for the mercy of endless, eternal black. 

It doesn't come. 

Instead, there's a prison cell, yellow-gold light streaming in even here. There's time--so much of it, too much, endless, unceasing minutes ticking by when all he can think of is Thanos, creeping ever closer. Frigga comes with books and comforts, and all he wants is to get her  _ away _ , away from his poisonous trail, away from anywhere the children of the Mad Titan could access him. 

"Am I not your mother?"

Loki wishes, for the billionth time, that Odin had just killed him. It would've been so much kinder than this agony. 

"You are not," he lies. 

*

Loki had a family, once. He remembers them distantly, puts panes of glass and bars of iron between his psyche and the memories, because when he lets himself sink into the warmth and comfort they bring he cannot  _ breathe _ with the pain of it all. 

But. That's not the point. 

Loki had a family, once. He had a wife named Sigyn and children, so many children, each different and beautiful and unique, so brave and strong and curious and _ good _ . They spent centuries together, curled up as a family in front of the fireplace, storybooks around them and half-finished tales of adventure hanging in the air above them. 

And then. And then. And then Odin decided enough was enough, decided Loki needed to pay for all his petty crimes and mistakes, for all the mischief he had caused. And then Loki's children were all dead. And then he spent the next age in a cave, tied down with what remained of them, Sigyn's tears falling almost as quickly as the acid she tried to catch. 

And it happened again. And again. And again. 

(This is the fate of the Norse gods: to know the end is coming. To know every bad choice, every mistake, every moment of peace and happiness and agony, before any of it happens. To know what they do wrong. To be unable to do anything different. To act it all out, like parts in a play, until the end--over and over, reborn but never restarting.)

(When he sees Sigyn this time, it's the same as always. She's standing in the flower market, bushel of lilies in hand, while he's taking a stroll away from the palace in normal clothes. They always find each other this way--across a busy street, flowers in one hand and hope in the other. Sigyn is crying, this time. She's looking him in the eyes, tears falling silently, her hands shaking where the acid had burned them to the bones, and--he understands. He still wakes at night sometimes, screaming the names of children he hasn't had.)

(She looks at him, knows the five hundred years of peace and happiness and love--so much love, true and undying and stronger than anything else he's ever felt--and turns away.)

(He understands. That doesn't make it hurt any less.)

*

Frigga dies. So does Odin, and the Warriors Three, and most of Asgard, actually. Sigyn makes it onto the ship, at least--he runs into her a few times on the bridge, conjures lilies for her hair and snacks for her family. He wants to ask if, now that everything is going sideways and Odin is dead ( _ Odin is dead _ and that has never happened before), if she wants to try again. Wants to try and forge their own happy ending. 

But she has her own family, and he has an idiot brother with no depth perception to take care of, and an ex-Valkyrie to drink with, and a creature made of rocks who wants help drafting a document laying out more power for the common people. 

In another life, he would have asked. But this isn't another life and he isn't another Loki. He is himself and despite all his best efforts, he hasn't been able to get rid of that spark of selflessness from Frigga entirely. 

He gives his lover lilies and walks away to leave her be. 

*

Loki dies. He swears his undying loyalty, steps forward with a dagger like a part of his own body, and dies, Thanos's fingers tight around his throat. Everything is bloody and cold and  _ pain _ one second and in the next, he is complete. Warm. Whole. He steps into Valhalla, gathers his children in his arms at last, and finally, finally rests. 

*

Loki doesn't die, not really. He slips away just in time, barely a shadow on the wall. He meets up with that gods-damned wizard on Earth, who watches him with a quiet kind of resentment and much more resignment, and hands over the time stone. 

"Don't break the universe, please."

Loki grins a wicked grin. He goes back, further-further-further into the past, usurps Odin and finds his mother before Asgardian politics ever made her desperate. He finds Sigyn and his children, saves Hela when she's just a little girl. He changes everything. 

The Norse gods have always lived with their destinies foretold, actors playing out parts of their stories on repeat. 

With a sliver of the universe in one hand and pure, undying determination in the other, Loki changes that. He changes everything because he wills it so. 

In the end, when even he is an old man and his grandchildren are grown, he returns the time stone to the wizard, mischief still written across his face and buried in his eyes. "I only broke it a little," he promises, and leaves.

*

Loki lives, or he doesn't. He changes everything, or he fails. Ragnarok comes and it is everything that is foretold. Ragnarok comes and it doesn't matter, because Asgard is a people, not a place. 

Take your pick. 

They're all true. 

 


End file.
